PrestaShop is a free, open source e-commerce solution available under the Open Software License and officially launched in August 2007. The software is written in PHP and based on the Smarty template engine and is currently used by 165,000 shops worldwide. The PrestaShop group was founded in Paris, with a second Headquarters opened in Miami in 2011. PrestaShop is translated into 63 languages, with English, French, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Russian having full…
$24
per month
Squarespace
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Squarespace is a CMS platform that allows users to create a DIY blog, eCommerce store, and/or portfolio (visual art or music). Some Squarespace website and shop templates are industry or use case-specific, such as menu builders for restaurant sites.
$25
per month
Volusion
Score 4.8 out of 10
N/A
Volusion is a cloud-based ecommerce solution from the company of the same name in Austin, TX. It features an intuitive dashboard, built-in marketing and promos, SEO, templates, and tools to customize look and appearance.
Volusion provided the best overall list of features, performance history, and bang for the buck. By not being the new kid on the block, they have worked out a lot the bugs and kinks that plague many ecommerce platforms. They've also refined a system that is very user-friendly …
This is a great system for small and medium businesses dealing from 1 product to 100,000 products. It is elegant to use and very stable. The system may not be great for converting into a marketplace and the handling of > 1million products. The system is also not suitable for services selling like events, registrations, subscriptions and ticket bookings etc.
Squarespace is one of the best solutions out there for building a website or web experience that looks good, has great functionality and is cost-effective, even for smaller businesses. Although most people in marketing will find most of the elements intuitive, if the creator is struggling with any of the functionality, there are many, many support options and other users who can offer assistance.
Volusion is a good company if you're starting out. The problem is that, if you want more complexity out of the program, you're kind of stuck. Also the regular time out errors and slow downs can be very frustrating. Packages that miss overnight deadlines because your system stops working can cost you customers. In today's highly competitive market, that's just something that's hard to put up with. If you have a lower volume of business you might be able to work around these issues.
The PayPal button modality was integrated with the PrestaShop system, which helped our clients to complete payments digitally in just a few seconds, this integrated button allowed to streamline many transactions.
Performing inventory reviews and modifying the PrestaShop catalog was one of the things that I liked the most, I could make changes to the catalog, make changes to the conditions of the products in the catalog and all those changes were reflected on my website in a instant, no need to wait some time.
The PrestaShop system created a digital invoice for each client who made the advance payment of a property, which made it even easier to complete the property negotiation. Customers came to our company with the digital invoice for the advance payment and it was easy to identify the property that was paid, thanks to the digital invoice.
Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them!
Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios.
They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it.
Templates are pre-built for a good end user experience. I've gone through the process of building custom sites as well as tweaking both free and paid templates that Volusion's design team provides.
Their support team didn't use to be as helpful, but in recent years have answered nearly all questions I've had. Their support section within the database provides detailed walkthrus as well.
Order processing is easy once you've been trained on the system. We got to a point where nearly the entire process was automated from initial purchase through shipping.
API calls use the previous call as a reference, even if you weren't the one we made the previous call. Can lead to data gaps, so you often have to set a manual date range to look back to make sure you aren't missing any data.
When you spend so much time with a product like this and not only have you witnessed its growth, but you almost feel like you are next those that make the decisions of building features a certain way, you can't help but want to stay and be a part of their continued growth. It's simply a great product. Can it improve? By all means! But it will only improve because of users and avid resellers like me.
It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.
Since we use PrestaShop OpenSource there is only community support. What we found is that many other users fight with the same problems and there seems no solution or input from the PrestaShop developers' side.
Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated
You have to wait on hold for at least 45 minutes every call—the tech support person never knows the answer right away so they put you on 10 minute holds only to come back and say they're still looking for answers. The chat function could take days to get a response. Our "Dedicated Account Manager" never checks in or answers, nor are they ever in the office when we call. It's like they try to be as unavailable as possible until you forget why you even called in the first place. Insane.
It is best to use the built-in features and recommended services for the most turn-key experience (ie. Skipjack for payment processing so that it can all be done from the Volusion backend).
It's a no-brainer for e-commerce stores. BigCommerce and Magento both far out-distanced PrestaShop in every major category. If you're just getting into e-commerce, I would highly recommend either BigCommerce or Magento. Their online documentation and support far outweigh any advantages you'd have over going with an open source software like PrestaShop.
Squarespace was quicker to set up and more accessible to manipulate the theme, pictures, and content. The page layouts are more versatile and fluid. With WordPress, more time-consuming efforts go into making a template work the way you want it to (because of the lack of the drag-and-drop grids that Squarespace has).
While k-eCommerce was very glamorous to us because it integrates with our main workflow, it just didn't have some of the marketing features that are so integral to the way we do business online. The set-up costs were also way too high. Volusion is so affordable and feature heavy, it makes it very difficult for any shopping cart provider to compete. You can find others who are competitively priced and have similar features, but they simply aren't as robust (at least for the way we use it)
It slowed down our Hosting service. Our website took a long time to fully load on our clients' devices due to the high consumption of the integration with the PrestaShop service.
It provided us with a fast billing service, where our clients obtained invoices in PDF mode for the electronic payments they made for the properties. These digital invoices helped us to recognize the property they wanted faster and streamlined the negotiation process.
The templates that had an optimized design, were too expensive, this caused that our catalog design was very simple and did not capture the interest of customers.
The cost is reasonably decent. My client says they spent about $20 a month or $240 a year. I asked her if she could add Google AdSense to her blog one day, and they believe they can. They said a custom site would cost them $3000-10,000 depending on who does it. And I agreed, but I found the website they created was on the lower end of that range.
Honestly, when you're in the dashboard, the UX is simply horrendous. I mean, everything that should be 1-2 clicks away is 4-6 clicks away, and each pages takes at least four seconds to load. You just find yourself wasting a lot of time waiting for things to load. This should be more simple.
